721–730 of 731 posts
A one-stop online shop for everything, automatic free shipping, automatically buying stuff you "need", many things that Amazon provides --- all of them are drugs from which we as a society must wean ourselves, even if the pains of withdrawal are great.
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You forget a third option. A monopolist doing the right thing from their good heart? Not gonna work. Legislators micromanaging every last aspect of every last thing through regulations? Not gonna work. Legislators squashing monopolies and making rules to keep competition intact and put meaningful choice into consumers' hands: Might work.
Huh.. That is an interesting idea. I like it. You have a company, it is worth below X dollars? You do what you want. Above X dollars, now you get government minder for every decision. All of the "buying to shutdown competitors"- not possible - you don't have enough cash! Well I mean, it would be possible, but it would also carry huge risk. (As you don't have infinite cash reserves) Keep your companies small and agile…
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You raise a very good counter to what feels like the main thrust of the guys article. It put to words something that felt "off" to me while reading it, that there was an assumption made that was never stated and was also incorrect - so thanks for putting that to words. He seems to assume that there is 1 air fryer that everyone on Earth should be getting, and all others are strictly inferior. There are probably no pro…
There is probably an air fryer that would be a good choice for the majority of people, and probably also the best choice for a large minority. This is probably true for a large number of popular products.
Customers are real humans with autonomy that need to bear responsibility for their own purchases ;)
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This reminds me of my dad's story about decades ago as a kid paperboy they had a contest get people to sign up and who ever had the most after a few months would win a bike. He smoked everyone. They were desperate to know how he got so many people to sign up but he refused to tell them. His trick, well back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you co…
> back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted. I miss that world.
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I've long felt that there needs to be a bill passed to charge companies $x additional tax each year where $x is the amount of government assistance their employees required in order to meet food/housing minimum standards. One way or the other, the companies that are making the rest of us pay for their employees to survive need to be funding these programs.
Isn't it actually the government's fault for setting minimum wage below food stamp wage?
Probably Amazon let's be real here
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Yes, the 130 volt bulb lasts longer when operated on 120 volts. My family would buy these when I was kid. Some probably non-LLM explanations: https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/why-buy-130-volt-light-bulbs https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/are-there-any-...
Yes, but that isn't a thing that is actually manufactured, due to the lightbulb cartel. And if it was manufactured, they'd label it as 120V, long-lasting, because no country uses 130V power. You can't just will arbitrary part specifications into existence. You can't declare that you need a 67.53 ohm resistor and then search for that. They only make certain values.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Feit-Electric-40-Watt-Soft-White...
https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/savant-ge-basic-in...
This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now. Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just pur…
As bad as Google's searches have become, they still do a better job finding the book on Amazon when Amazon's search can't find a book when I put in the title and author's last name. It is common for "sponsored results" to include trousers when I am searching for a book.
Amazon search has been terrible for as long as I can remember. Not to disregard the scourge of ads that has infested the results but I've been frustrated with Amazon search for almost 2 decades. Oh sure, their search gives you the impression you can filter/sort but due to zero policing anyone can say whatever they want about their product and I have the feeling Amazon just sucks at this on top of the seller malice. J…
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I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless. Best Buy, Microcenter, B&H, Walmart all do better. They just don't have the range or sometimes do not respect my tax forms. I am an hour drive from a larger town with a big box store like Walmart. The Best Buy closed. The closest thing nearby is something called Tractor Supply. They p…
> I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless. We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon…